I think the ship stuff is pretty deliberate.

The really important thing to understand is that your point-defense is local, while the missiles/fighters offense is global. That means no matter how good your point defense is, if battles get big enough, all their weapons can be brought to bear on you, while you can only defend with a few. You can ...

That list of three is mine, too. It's fairly minimalistic (that does not mean small!) in terms of dev time, and would have pretty big returns on the main part of the game (combat). I really want to have to wince and struggle to decide my ship load out, rather than throw on the best guns with all the...

A comment in another thread made me think: it would be pretty cool if larger ships took longer to retreat than smaller ones. But the AI might be a limiting factor in making that mechanic viable.

If you play with a lot of planets 100+, then queue management gets to be a bit much. Given how the economy works, I actually find many planets quite manageable compared to comparable games. Most planets should just be set on Mining/Research, while a few core worlds pump out ships (and are the only ...

The same is true of the Human missile cruiser. They come with extra munitions built in, but they're fairly underwhelming in terms of potential loadout.

Nice work on the new patch release! Looking forward to trying out the stable build.

I really like the ships with well defined and unique roles - the small Ashdar vessels, Gremak vessels, and even the clearly improvised Phidi designs. Yoral small ships are cool, but I felt got outclassed quickly (except torpedo boats). Tinker ships always strike me as 'a series of platforms for more...

I don't mind a few overpowered tools (especially in a singleplayer game with a decent AI) - I'd just like them to be a bit more exciting (cloaking devices; stellar beams; teleportation units) than just torpedo spam.

On the efficient long range doom fleet conundrum, it's worth listing the three components: 1. Increasing the cost of torpedo destroyer hulls reduces the efficiency. 2. Mechanics that encourage splitting of fleets reduces the 'doom fleet' aspect. 3. Late game weapons with big bonuses to engaging at c...

Because ships move in a particular direction and (many) have directional weapons, shield facing is tactically meaningful; you may have to choose between optimal weapons bearing and optimal protection. As it worked out in actual gameplay, this element of meaningful impact is smaller than perhaps it ...

This is where I can only theorize: I suspect it might have been to allow better survivability for small vessels vs large fleets and large ships vs large amount of small ships...

Could be. But that seems quite a convoluted means of going about such a thing.

I would assume that the spinning around of ships like a merry go round for the sake of absorbing damage via all shield segments and thus win additional time for regen is an exploit as it is not something the AI understand, looks odd and is a hugely micro-intensive activity - would be bad game-desig...

Good idea, sven. That tech does run counter to the design as it stands; your tweak makes it cleaner.

The fillers are important for reducing micromanagemet. It's great most planets get a bunch of mines and a mining order, and then I don't think about them anymore.